The National Geographic Magazine
Mayan numerical signs * with a date which
means November 4, 291 B.C. (Spinden Cor
relation). This slab is the oldest dated work
of man in America.t
Today's Chinese characters are still the
ancient ideograms, although centuries of writ
ing have so modified their appearance that the
original form of many cannot be recognized.
The civilized world owes all its alphabets
to the Phoenicians, those amazing manu
facturers, traders, and seamen who lived along
the eastern end of the Mediterranean in an
cient times.
Tyre and Sidon were the Phoenician sea
ports; Carthage was their colony. The Phoe
nicians built the Hebrew temple for King
Solomon at Jerusalem (I Kings V). They also
made the metal work and furniture for the old
Assyrian royal palaces. They built ships and
sailed all over the Mediterranean.
To keep their books, they eventually de
vised an alphabet with 22 letters, each a
consonant. About 1000 B. c., this alphabet
passed on to the Greeks, who added vowels.
The first letter in Greek is alpha, the second
beta; so the whole list acquired its English
name from these two characters-"alphabet."
Later, the Greeks and Romans changed the
Phoenicians' direction of writing from right to
left. They wrote left to right, and we, in com
mon with the Latin languages and others, still
follow that practice. Arabs, Persians, and
others, who borrowed the same alphabet, write
from right to left.
The Phoenicians exported papyrus to
Greece. Most of it came from their thriving
city of Byblos; so the Greeks started calling
the paper itself, byblos. Later, when they
wrote books on rolls of such paper, they called
them biblia. From this came the word
"Bible," meaning "book" or "books."
Basic English
From Greece the Phoenician alphabet
spread to Italy and then all over Europe.
Aramaean merchants carried it to India with
their trading caravans. The world learned to
write.
When Mr. Churchill addressed Harvard
University last September, he referred to the
future possibilities of Basic English as a
world language.
Basic English is a system devised by two
Englishmen, C. K. Ogden of Cambridge, Eng
* See "Foremost Intellectual Achievement of An
cient America," by Sylvanus G. Morley, NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, February, 1922.
t See "Discovering the New World's Oldest Dated
Work of Man," by Matthew W. Stirling, NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, August, 1939.
land, and Ivor Richards, now of Harvard Uni
versity.
Chief purposes of Basic, according to its
sponsors, are to provide an international aux
iliary language for world-wide use in general
communication, commerce, and science, and to
impart an easy introduction to English.
The inventors picked a vocabulary of 850
words: 600 are nouns, 150 are adjectives. The
remaining 100 are "operation" words which
put the system to work as normal English.
The "operators" include only 16 verbs.
They are "can, get, give, go, keep, let, make,
put, seem, take, be, do, have, say, see, send."
They take the place of about 4,000 common
verbs in the English tongue. Other "opera
tors" are prepositions (directives, Basic calls
them), pronouns, adverbs, etc.
By combining one of the operator verbs with
Basic nouns or prepositions, etc.,
thoughts
may be expressed which ordinarily would re
quire many other verbs.
In Basic, you do not enter a room, ascend
a mountain, descend a hill, climb a tree, leave
a building, or cross a bridge. Instead, you
go in a room, go up a mountain, go up a tree,
go down a hill, go out of a building, or go over
a bridge.
Rules of grammar are limited to five, one
of which deals with adding er, ing, and ed
to nouns, so they may combine readily with
the 16 verbs.
As the new system keeps the natural struc
ture of the language, a person may go on with
his education to a fuller knowledge without
trouble. Friends of the system see a fertile
field for growth in every land.
The two preceding sentences are in Basic
English.
Mme. Ivy Litvinov, wife of the former
Soviet Ambassador to the United States,
taught Basic to classes of Russian soldiers.
Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek also
are enthusiasts, and classes in Basic have
proved popular in China.
The Harvard Commission on English Lan
guage Studies has introduced the system into
Latin America.
For many years other scholars have studied
the possibilities of an international language.
Esperanto is the best known.
Whatever the future of international lan
guages may be, the importance of freer com
munication to world relationship steadily
grows.
Said Mr. Churchill at Harvard:
"The empires of the future are the empires
of the mind."
As ever, the processes of the mind will be
expressed in words.
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